Bazterrica, Agustina
Entry updated 9 October 2023. Tagged: Author.
(1974- ) Argentinian author of the Near Future Cadáver exquisito (2017; trans Sarah Moses as Tender Is the Flesh 2020), set in a world where a Pandemic caused by a fatal virus very readily transmissible from animals to humans has generated a point of Transition, after which, all "lower" creatures having been destroyed, it has become necessary, if only in a culinary sense, for humans to become food. Suspicions are aroused that the governments of the world – overwhelmed by Climate Change which is responsible for increasing waves of desperate migrants, and human Overpopulation which is rampant at a time when all other planetary species have been exposed to the Sixth Extinction – have created the Transition to solve these problems.
Migrants being occasionally resistant, factory farms have been established to breed human livestock (see Dystopia; Horror in SF; Slavery). The tale takes place seemingly some decades after cruel adjustments have been made to human society, in order for this transformation to become the modus vivendi, with strict censorships and curfews, but no crowding: the Satire is both deadpan and exorbitant. Echoes of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to their Parents or their Country and for Making them Beneficial to the Publick (1729 chap) seem entirely deliberate. [JC]
Agustina María Bazterrica
born Buenos Aires, Argentina: 1974
works (selected)
- Cadáver exquisito (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Alfaguara, 2017) [pb/]
- Tender Is the Flesh (London: Pushkin Press, 2020) [trans by Sarah Moses of the above: pb/]
- Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird (London: Pushkin Press, 2023) [coll: trans by Sarah Moses: pb/]
links
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